2014 Canadian Grand Prix first practice

Fernando Alonso headed the two Mercedes drivers by a slender margin in the first practice session for the Canadian Grand Prix.

The Ferrari headed the times by 16 thousandths of a second ahead of Lewis Hamilton, who led much of the early running. Team mate Nico Rosberg was third-quickest, a tenth of a second off the other Mercedes.

But not for the first time this year the second Ferrari of Kimi Raikkonen ran into technical trouble. A radio message revealed the team had noticed his engine was knocking, and soon afterwards he returned to the pits for a lengthy spell. He later returned to the track and set the ninth-fastest time.

A late improvement by Daniel Ricciardo moved him up to sixth place behind team mate Sebastian Vettel and the Williams of Valtteri Bottas. The two McLarens were separated by less than a tenth of a second ahead of Raikkonen.

Jean-Eric Vergne put his Toro Rosso in the top ten despite also suffering a technical setback during the race.

Monaco points-scorer Jules Bianchi was the first driver to strike one of the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve’s notorious walls. He glanced the barrier at turn four, damaging the right-rear of his car, leaving him crawling back to the pits for repairs.

Alexander Rossi made his first appearance in a practice session this year and finished it at the bottom of the times, three-tenths of a second off team mate Marcus Ericsson.

Don’t get your hopes up too much @aimalkhan, If I read that right, Alonso set his time at the end of the session where Hamilton and Rosberg had done theirs a lot earlier, and the track here certainly gets faster as it gets less “green”.

Alonso’s car were probably with low fuel. Nothing to understand until Satudary 3rd Practice (IMHO), we will see where Ferrari’s are and if they have close the gap with RBR. It seems to me Mercedes is in another league so, impossible to be close to them.

seeing those cars sliding all over the place is hard on the nerves,
well done Alonso lets hope your still up there in qualifying,
i am sure i noticed faster speeds down the straights or at least not far off what Merc where doing this time around.

@beejis60 If your talking about the very large cameras on either side of the roll hoop then there the teams own thermal cameras, Several teams run them during Friday sessions.

The T-bar camera on the top of the roll hoop didn’t look any different to normal to me & its in the regulations that every car must carry a camera there & that the housing has to be the same size/shape on every car to ensure nobody gets an aero advantage or disadvantage from running it.

Having said that on Friday FOM do sometimes place a special 3D in-car housing in the T-bar camera location to get a few laps of footage for promotional purposes.
That setup is just 2 Gopro cameras placed in there 3D setup as you can see from Monaco where it was put on a few different teams through the 2 Friday sessions-http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/merc-hami-mona-2014-8.jpg

Yeah there the teams own thermal image cameras, They provide a lot more information than the thermal images you see from the FOM units on the TV broadcast. Teams can also set them up to get whatever data they are interested in getting.

Different teams run different types of camera, Mercedes, Red Bull & Force India run similar housings & I’ve seen Williams use them as well at times. McLaren & Ferrari run smaller units which are built into the dummy camera housings.
You can see the Ferrari unit on the right side of the car in the image at the top of this article (FOM TV camera is on the left side of the car).